Read Nothing On Earth for Free Online Page A

umbrellas as parasols, as if they were in a procession in the tropics. Helen and the girl stood, hands crossed the way they had seen others do when praying, until the coffin was carried out and down to the hearse.
    It was that night, the night of Harry’s removal, when the girl screamed. That night, or the night immediately after. It was near eleven. Helen was in the bath and the girl screamed, ‘There’s someone in the garden!’
    â€˜What, now?’
    Helen climbed out of her lukewarm suds, wrapped herself in a beach towel and went into the second bedroom, where the girl was standing at the window. Against their rear wall was a pale thumbnail that might well have been a face staring up at them. They ran downstairs. Paul was at the patio door, trying to peer through his own reflection, flicking the switch of the outside patio light.
    â€˜Nothing works,’ he was growling. ‘Why does nothing fucking work?’
    She switched off all the lights indoors so that the inside dark merged with the dark of the garden. Paul rattled the handle of the patio door half-heartedly, thumped on the double-glazing, but the face stayed where it was. She turned all the lights back on, ran up to the caravan and rapped on its thin door with her knuckle.
    â€˜Come in,’ Marcus’s voice called.
    Marcus was seated, one knee drawn up to his chest. Martina stood in the square yard of floor space in a bikini top. ‘Hello there,’ Martina said, as if her sister were someone she kind of knew from work. Martina had her arms roped around herself. She was shivering.
    â€˜Hello back.’ The inside of the caravan smelt of something resembling disinfectant. She felt suddenly self-conscious, having nothing around her except a wet towel. She said, ‘Excuse the intrusion.’
    Marcus had been watching
Lost
. He had seen nothing. She could hear her own raised voice saying how she couldn’t see the point of Marcus being paid to watch
Lost
in a caravan while all that shit was going on around them on site.
    â€˜All what shit?’ Marcus had stood out of his seat. ‘If you have a problem with the way I’m performing my duties, then you should speak to my uncle about it.’
    When Martina shouted, ‘You’re being rude,’ which of them was she shouting at?
    â€˜Otherwise,’ Marcus snapped, ‘I’ll bid you goodnight.’ He pushed the inside of the caravan door with the toe of his steel-capped boot so that it swung outwards, flimsily, on its hinges. Helen ran back down to the house to find Paul scrabbling for a hammer, the only tool they possessed, under the sink.
    â€˜Where the hell,’ she asked, ‘do you think you’re going with that?’
    â€˜Round the rear access.’ Paul’s voice was shaking. ‘Sick of this.’
    The black was impure. It wasn’t the black you get in winter, which is so absolute as to sparkle. This was the virtual black of a May that was almost over and was already the hottest in recorded history. The black was grainy, fraying with greys and pinks at the edges, like darkness that someone had captured on video. When Paul materialized at the back gate, he had the hammer cocked shoulder-high and was taking long, slow steps. He looked a bit of a clown, like something out of a cartoon: to Helen, a beach towel knotted around her and her wet hair combed back; to the girl, who was at her mother’s shoulder and still had headphones around her throat; to Martina, who had put on a sweater and followed her sister back down to the house.
    â€˜Nothing,’ he shouted. ‘Not a sinner.’ Helen unlocked the patio door, stepped out onto the warm cement and told Paul to come back in. ‘I wanted to find something. Someone.’
    â€˜I know what you mean,’ she said. What did he mean? Did he mean that nothing there, and nothing there repeatedly, was the biggest fear of all? Still gripping the knot of her towel,